Limassol by Yishai Sarid

gray hair, who greeted me in sandals in his clinic at Kibbutz Shefayim. From the lawn outside wafted an afternoon calm, the distant voices of children. The glow of the setting sun fell through treetops heavy with foliage. I would have preferred to talk with a woman. Quietly, without much introduction, he asked me to tell him about the work, the pressures, what happened. I gave him as precise a description as I could.
    â€œWhat did you feel?” he asked.
    I recalled the last look of the fat man who choked, who knew his end was near, how I respected him for not talking. “I wasn’t mad at him,” I said to the therapist. “I understood him. It was something mechanical, to get the secret out of him, the way you get a tumor out of somebody. With pliers, with a white hot blade, hanging by the feet so the secret will fall out of his head. We hated the Inquisition, but they knew how to get the job done. They simply extracted the confession as a dentist takes out a rotten tooth.” I knew those words wouldn’t help me get back to the job, but it relieved me a little to get them out. “How do they expect you to stop a suicide bomber,” I said to him. An orange sun poured in through the screened window. “Reason alone doesn’t work. Reason has no place in their work, and it has no place in ours. We are two tribes of gorillas hitting one another. Like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , only our sticks are more advanced. We use spy satellites to smell the belch from the mouth of some guy in Jenin after his meal of hummus with beans and onions. In the end, it comes down to pain, skin, nerves, the stinking bag, the hands in cuffs that bite into the flesh. To keep you from having to use that, they have to be deathly afraid of what you’re liable to do to them. But they’re not scared enough. They’ve heard about all the kinds of torture we can’t employ. So now and then you’ve got to do something out of the ordinary, brutal, so the rumor will spread. I had no problem with the second one, the greasy-haired pimp, the one whose teeth I knocked out. I had no respect for him. Because of people like him, they’re losing. But the first one, the fat one, he was a strong man. He didn’t care if he died. He was not going to fold or to betray. He knew he had to gain time, another few hours, until his little brother blew himself up. He wanted to die with him. They build monuments to people like that.”
    I went on like that for a long time, without stopping, running off at the mouth, at times I forgot the therapist was there. He was silent and wrote. It was nice to sit in his room and get out words from the heart.
    When I fell silent, he asked only one question: “Do you want to continue doing what you do?”
    So the cat was out of the bag. I thought he wanted to hear me, to treat me, but all at once, he moved over to their side. Everything I said would go to them, there would be no immunity here.
    â€œThey want me to stop?” I asked.
    â€œWhat do you want?” he asked. All his questions were open—not like with us, we demanded places, dates, names.
    â€œI want them not to kill us,” I said.
    â€œAnd you, do you want to live?”
    I didn’t hold back. I described my recurring dream—Temple Mount, the turquoise faucets, my slaughter—and he smiled for the first time, couldn’t repress the smile, as if he had come upon the elephant man of psychology. “That’s where the binding of Isaac was, right there,” he whispered in amazement, and leaned back satisfied as if he had just finished screwing.
    Doctor Freud didn’t ask a thing about my wife, the child, my parents, Rehovoth. I would have gone into all that if he had asked, I wanted to talk with somebody. He didn’t ask.
    I asked when to come back. He said it wasn’t urgent, but he recommended resting a little more. I was sorry about what I had said, that I